


Red Wine and Green Spirits

by Anonymosquito



Series: By the Way, What the Fu- [3]
Category: DanPlan
Genre: I’ll add tags later, ghost au, ghost!Daniel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-01
Updated: 2019-10-09
Packaged: 2020-11-08 23:41:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 3,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20843954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anonymosquito/pseuds/Anonymosquito
Summary: Daniel wakes up one morning to something strange going on.





	1. Chapter 1

Dan sat up with a gasp. His breathing was heavy and he grabbed his chest. He just woke up from a nightmare and needed a moment to gather his bearings.

He tried to recall what happened, but he had forgotten. He only remembered a flash of light and sitting up in bed. He rubbed his face and took a deep breath. He reached for his phone on his nightstand but his hand only hit wood. It wasn’t where he remembered it being the night before. He looked out his window to see the sun rising, lighting up the area outside. 

He got out of bed, finding he had apparently kicked the sheets off of him in the night.

He walked downstairs, his footsteps quiet on the creaky stairs. In the living room, Hosuh was asleep on the couch. The TV was off and the remote was on the coffee table. 

Daniel passed Hosuh, heading for the kitchen. He looked around for his phone until he heard a groan. 

Hosuh stood up, wrapping himself in his blanket. He started walking towards the stairs, not acknowledging Dan at all. 

“Goodnight, sleepyhead,” he jokingly called, hoping to glean a response. Hosuh just continued upstairs, not even showing that he heard. “Someone’s tired,” he muttered. 

Not being able to find his phone, he sat in the spot Hosuh had vacated and reached for the remote. As he grabbed it, he heard a pop from the device. A liquid started to seep through the back panel. 

Dan flipped it over and opened the battery compartment. Both of the batteries had suddenly exploded and battery acid was leaking from the shells. Before it dripped anywhere, he set it in the kitchen counter with several paper towels. 

Before he sat down again, he heard a thud and curse from above. He chuckled, recognizing what happened. 

Daniel got to the top of the stairs as Stephen’s room door opened. The feathered man was massaging a wing as he approached the staircase. 

“Did you roll over on them again?” Dan asked slyly. 

Stephen showed no indication of hearing him, continuing to walk towards him. 

“Hey, it was a joke; no need to ignore me,” he awkwardly laughed. Stephen was now so close that he was almost bumping into him. “Don’t push me down the-“ Daniel was interrupted mid-sentence by Stephen running into him.

Only, he didn’t run into him. 

He went through him.


	2. Chapter 2

He was falling. 

He’d leaned too far and he’d taken another step back in shock into the open air. He felt his feet leave the step and squeezed his eyes shut, anticipating the blow from his head hitting the stairs. He waited, but it never came. 

He opened his eyes, looking up towards the ceiling. He turned in place to face down, realizing he was floating above the stairs. 

He felt a twinge across his left side as his breathing picked up. Looking at his arm, he watched painless bruises blooming to the surface, growing at the same rate as his distress. He rubbed his face and closed his eyes, trying to fight off the panic. In one wave, he pushed back against it. 

The lightbulb above him shattered, the glass hitting the floor at the same time he did. Despite how hard he fell, he didn’t feel or hear the impact. 

“Huh?” he heard. He looked at the bottom of the stairs to find Stephen looking up at the light and at the broken glass, indirectly looking through Dan to see it. 

“Stephen?” he said, nervously. “Did you see that? What’s going on?” Before he could even finish, Stephen had turned around and headed for the kitchen. He looked through the cabinets, pulling out a dust pan. Completely ignoring Daniel, he started sweeping up the glass, even going through him a few times. 

“Can’t you see me?” he asked, the question falling on deaf ears. He waved a hand in front of Stephen’s face, doing nothing other than causing a small draft for the other man. He tried grabbing his shoulder, but his hand passed through it, making both of them shudder, one from a sudden chill and the other from the strangeness of the situation. 

“Is this like an out of body experience?” he muttered to himself. He’d heard about them from some show, but didn’t think they were real. And if it was an out of body experience, why did he have bruises appearing?

“Daniel?” Stephen suddenly called, surprising the person in question. He set the dustpan down after a moment passed with no response. Passing through him again, he headed back up the stairs, going to Dan’s room. Daniel followed him, careful to stay out of his way. 

“We need different… lightbulbs,” he said, opening Daniel’s door and getting quieter as he realized the room was empty. “He usually tells me…” he muttered, trailing off. He closed the door and walked downstairs again. Daniel stayed behind, looking at his door. 

“Where am I?” he asked himself. If this was an out of body experience, then his body had to be somewhere. He reached for the door handle, but again went through it. He sighed and walked through the door, shivering at the odd feeling. 

He searched his room but couldn’t find any clues as to where he was. He tried to drop onto his bed but started floating again. When he tried to fall, he fell through the floor and through the coffee table in the living room.

“What?” He heard Stephen say. He was staring almost directly at Daniel. He looked down at the table and realized he had disturbed some papers and a few had fallen to the floor. “Where’d that draft come from?” he asked himself. 

“It’s not a draft,” Dan muttered, picking himself out of the table. 

Stephen was in the kitchen making a bowl of cereal. He shrugged off the strange incident and sat at the table to eat. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and started scrolling through it. Dan looked over his shoulder to see what he was doing. Ironically, he was texting the person who was right behind him about the house being drafty and to come home. 

“Might as well have some fun,” Dan said. He’d have to wait until Stephen realizes something’s wrong, and that might take a while. Messing with him would be a great way to pass the time. He gently blew against the back of his neck, making him get goosebumps and look behind him.


	3. Chapter 3

It took until into the afternoon. 

It took many hours for Stephen to finally realize that he hadn’t heard from Daniel all day. He started texting and calling, but received no answer. 

Dan watched him pacing across the living room, watching as another call was sent to voicemail. Stephen made a sound that was a mix between a groan and a growl. His feathers were ruffled and he had to keep his wings from shaking. 

“Screw it; he’s had enough sleep,” he said, suddenly changing directions, heading for the stairs. Dan followed as he walked straight to Hosuh’s room. 

“Hosuh!” he shouted, opening the door. The person in question shot up in bed, the covers flying off his head. “Get out your coffin; do you know where Daniel is?”

“Wha- no? Is he not home?” he said sleepily. 

“No, and he’s not answering his phone,” he said, shaking his phone for emphasis. “Do you know know where he might be?”

“Well, he went on a walk this morning,” he said. He dragged his legs over the side of the bed into a sitting position. 

“What?” Daniel said to himself. Hosuh couldn’t seem to see him either. “I didn’t-“

“When?” Stephen unknowingly interrupted. 

“He came downstairs around four a.m. complaining about not being able to go back to sleep,” he said. “He said he’d be back in less then an hour, but an hour later, I texted him and he said he was on his way home. I fell asleep after that.”

“But I woke up around around eight-“ he started saying. He felt a sensation concentrated on his right arm but that also spread to other spots. He ignored it. 

“Do you know where he went?” Stephen interrupted again. 

“I don’t remember-“ he tried to say again. He was gradually becoming more and more desperate for them to see him, not seeing how that was affecting him physically. 

“The last text he sent said he was by the bakery not too far from the house,” he said, scrolling through his phone to check. 

“We should go check there,” Stephen said. 

“But I’m right here,” he tried again to no avail. 

Hosuh and Stephen hurriedly went downstairs. Stephen found a jacket and pulled it over the wings on his back. Hosuh was anxiously waiting by the door. When Stephen finished, he turned to head out. 

Daniel immediately realized two things that were wrong. Hosuh didn’t know what time it was, and he was about to get blasted with sunlight because he was only wearing a T-shirt and shorts. Secondly, there was a large clump of feathers hanging out of Stephen’s jacket. 

“Wait!” he called, falling on deaf ears. They were about to open the door, and in a last act of desperation, he reached toward them. 

For the first time in a few hours, he felt something solid. Specifically, he felt a clump of hair and a clump of feathers. No matter what he grabbed, he felt it and pulled. 

“Ow!” he heard two voices shout. Hosuh reached back to his hair and Stephen reached back towards his wings. 

“What was that?” Hosuh asked. He looked at Stephen and saw the feathers sticking out of the jacket. “Hey, you’ve got something there,” he said, pointing. 

“Thanks,” he said, adjusting the feathers and his jacket. He looked at Hosuh and suddenly looked alarmed. “You were going to go outside in that? It’s a sunny day right now!” Dan drifted over and managed to ruffle the curtains, letting some light in. 

“Oh,” he said. “I didn’t even think about that.” 

“Just go get ready,” he sighed. 

While Hosuh was getting more covering clothes on, Dan took a breathe of relief. He looked at his hands, remembering the feeling. That’s when he noticed something. Adding to the bruises, he had a lot of scratches as scrapes, and it looked like large patches of skin were missing from his right arm. His shirt and pants also looked torn as well. 

“What?” he began to ask to himself. He didn’t have much time to think about it because Hosuh came downstairs in a hoodie and sweatpants and they were heading out the door.


	4. Chapter 4

They almost ran the whole way to the bakery. 

Daniel had to work to keep up, his transparent form not wanting to go much above a walking speed. 

Once they reached the street corner the bakery was located on, they stopped. 

“So, what are we looking for?” Hosuh asked. He pulled his hood down further to keep his face from being burned, burning his hand in the process. 

“I don’t know,” Stephen said. “I didn’t think this far. Are there any signs of him?”

Dan joined them in looking around, floating above the little bit of traffic there was. All he could see was the occasional passerby, gum on the sidewalk, and oil marks on the street. 

He drifted back down to his friends as they entered the shop, going through the closing door. Stephen and Hosuh were asking the employees if they’d seen him, showing them a picture. 

After a few minutes, they gave up. None of the employees were working at the time Daniel was by the bakery. In a last ditch effort, Stephen tried calling him again. 

They suddenly perked up when they heard a familiar ringtone a few meters away. 

They found the source of the noise by a nearby storm drain. Picking it up, Hosuh had to shake some small pieces of glass from the horribly cracked screen. 

“It’s his phone,” he said. 

“What happened to it?” Stephen asked. 

“I don’t know,” Hosuh murmured. 

“Excuse me?” they suddenly heard. All three spun around to see an old lady coming out of the bakery. She had an employee’s hat and badge, only her’s said “Manager.”

“Yes?” Stephen said politely. 

“I heard that you two were looking for a young man who came by here this morning,” she said. 

“Yes, we are,” Hosuh said. He brought out his phone and showed her the picture of Daniel, hoping she didn’t notice how his hand was turning red. “Do you know where he is?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know where he is now, but I saw him this morning,” she responded. “While I was opening the shop, I dropped some papers and he helped me pick them up. I couldn’t have done it myself, with my bad back, so I offered him a pastry as a way to say thank you.”

Daniel listened to her story and a feeling of familiarity started to make itself known. He looked towards the shop entrance and remembered the papers starting to be blown away, the old woman trying to grab as many as she could. He remembered that after he’d helped, she gave him a danish for free. 

“We had a chat for a while, but then he got a message on his cell phone and he said that he had to go. I went back to finish opening the store while he went outside, and… oh dear,” she paused. 

He remembered leaving, looking down at his phone to message Hosuh back, looking back up to see that there was a red light and a signal allowing him to cross the street, looking back down to send another message as he crossed, looking back up as he heard a car coming, and…

Suddenly, some of the oil marks on the road didn’t look like oil anymore. 

“I heard the most horrendous sound. I rushed back out and there he was, lying on the asphalt. Before I could see if he was okay, the man in the truck stepped out and dragged him into the back before speeding off. I didn’t get a good look at either of them, but your friend looked badly hurt.”

Dan remembered the way the car crashed into his left, hearing multiple cracks as he was shoved to the ground, his right arm being skinned before he started tumbling, rocks tearing his clothes and cutting his skin. He remembered looking into the headlights, pain everywhere, but he could only focus on one feeling. 

Daniel felt a now painless crack. He felt a horribly familiar sensation as moisture build up in his chest. He let out a wet cough as the feeling of broken ribs puncturing his lung, filling it with blood, settled in. 

He remembered rough hands grabbing his arm, dragging him as the world faded into blackness. 

He felt warm trails of liquid dripping past his lips. He felt his mouth and looked at his bloodstained hand. He looked down at himself. His clothes were torn and red around the cuts, the bruises on his left arm looked worse than they did earlier, and the cloth around his collar was dyed a deep red. 

Hosuh, Stephen, and the old woman were still talking, but Daniel didn’t hear them. 

He muttered to himself, “I’m dead.”


	5. Chapter 5

Daniel absentmindedly followed his friends. They’ve been visiting nearby hospitals to check if the man that took him brought him to one. So far, they weren’t having any luck. 

The sun was beginning to set, and they were getting tired. Hosuh was tired of getting burned, and Stephen was tired of running around all afternoon. Dan wanted to tell them to go home, and he tried, but they never acknowledged him. 

When Stephen started lagging behind, Hosuh realized that they’d need to give up. He convinced him by saying they’d search more tomorrow. 

At the house, Stephen wanted to stay up for a while and Hosuh wasn’t tired yet. They’d set his phone on the table and checked theirs every once in a while. They sat somberly in the dimly lit kitchen. Someone had turned on the TV to create background noise, but it was quickly forgotten. 

Daniel leaned over the table to look at his phone. He hasn’t had the best luck with technology since the incident, but he hadn’t tried anything with a phone yet. 

He put his hand near it and its screen flashed to life. It hadn’t turned on since they found it, and the light attracted some attention. 

“Did his phone just turn on?” Stephen asked. 

“Yeah,” Hosuh responded. He looked over at it, seeing all the notifications from missed calls and texts. Dan put his hand closer to the phone, hoping it’d react in some way. Hosuh raised an eyebrow as if he noticed something. “I think it’s really broken. The battery just went from in the seventies down to below fifty.”

The closer he got to it, the worse it seemed to get, so he backed off. This at least gave him a faint glimmer of hope that they’d realize that he was there. 

He reached for a lamp next. It flickered and faded in and out. He himself was starting to feel a slight buzz of energy, getting slightly stronger the closer he got to the light. 

“Do you think he’s okay?” Hosuh asked, breaking Dan out of his thought process. He went back to the table and stood at the opposite end. 

“I don’t know,” Stephen replied truthfully. “But I hope he is.”

“He has to be, right?” he said, almost to himself. His voice started to get more frustrated and desperate. “After everything that’s happened to us, me becoming a vampire, you fucking growing wings, after all this crazy bull shit, he can’t just be gone because somebody ran a red light.” He’d started tearing up a little bit. Tears formed in Daniel’s own eyes, knowing that that’s exactly what happened. 

“I don’t know,” Stephen said, this time through clenched teeth. His wings started to curl around his shoulders to form a hug. “But you’re right. He’s got to be alright. It just doesn’t seem possible that he’s…” he trailed off. Tears fell from every eye within a few seconds. Dan’s seemed to disappear the moment they dropped off his face. 

“But I’m not gone,” he said hopelessly. “Why can’t you just,” he raised his hands in the air, frustration building, not noticing all the light that were previously off flash on, “see me!” He slammed his fists down onto the table and all the lights turned off, even the ones that were already on. The TV turned off as well, making the room suddenly silent. He’d expected to pass through the table again, but he made hard contact. He noticed he felt the buzzing energy flowing through him again, only stronger this time. 

He looked at his hands again, wondering how he can do that. He peered up, expecting his friends to be staring at the table that just violently shook, only to find them staring straight at him. 

“Daniel?” Hosuh slowly asked. He was both relieved that Dan was there and horrified as he stared at the visage of his bloody, battered, and bruised friend. 

“Y-you can see me?” he asked, not quite believing it. 

“What happened to you?” Stephen asked. Dan let out a strangled laugh and a wet cough, letting some more blood drip from his mouth, flowed by tears of happiness. 

“You can finally see me!” he exclaimed. He went through the table and managed to solidly pull both of his friends into a hug.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long! Especially for such a short chapter, but school has been not fun and all.

They let the hug go on for a while. The lights flickered a bit and Daniel started to pass through them again. They let him go and his figure became transparent as some of the lights turned back on. The three of them talked for a while about the day, its happenings, and their perspectives. 

The next weeks lead to Daniel discovering how to manipulate his image to make the injuries disappear, Stephen finding out what was giving him energy to stay visible and occasionally palpable when they got their electricity bill, and Hosuh doing research on other ways to give ghosts energy. 

In the end, there was always at least one candle lit in the kitchen since Hosuh found fire as an energy source on multiple paranormal websites. It seemed to work just as well, however. 

They visited the manager of the bakery to tell her that Daniel was alright, not mentioning any of the supernatural parts of the story. She was overjoyed and relieved that he’s safe. 

Dan was getting better at controlling his ghostly powers, but there were things he started missing. He could no longer sleep, eat, smell, or feel pain. Especially saddening was how the lit candles were always his favorite scents, yet he would never smell them again. At least he was never really bored since either Hosuh, Stephen, or both were usually up at any time. 

Overall, life fell back into its new normal. 

Until-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That ending was a bit of a joke (well, kinda). But the next story will be the By the Way, what the Fu- Halloween special!


End file.
